Film Theory: Diagnosing The Grinch! (Dr Seuss How The Grinch Stole Christmas)

the grinch hated christmas the whole christmas season oh please don't ask why no one quite knows the reason this is a line from the original book so i dug through the pages to give it a look and wouldn't you know i came to a theory for why the grinch may not be so cheery it isn't his shoes or some weird tradition it all boils down to a pre-existing condition so cozy up for a holiday tale you love most about a medical problem that went undiagnosed hello internet welcome to film theory the show that's as cuddly as a cactus and as charming as an eel so like a lot of people i decided to start the first week of december by kicking my feet up opening netflix and watching the 2018 version of the dr seuss christmas classic how the grinch stole christmas it actually gave me a few ideas for a really interesting theory but when i went back to re-watch the movie just a few days later it was gone completely removed from netflix us as of december 4th and i gotta say really really taken a christmas movie off the most popular streaming service during the first week of december right before the time of year when everyone wants to stream it demotion picture companies really think that they're going to be able to squeeze an extra 399 out of me by taking the movie off the service right at the start of december because if so well they were right but i had to call them all out just to let you all know who the real grinches are this december anyway we're here today to talk about everyone's favorite christmas villain except is he a villain really and i'm not just doing the whole film theory the villain isn't the villain thing i am asking this sincerely because if you look at how the characters introduced in the first five minutes of the 2018 movie we're shown that by december 20th he is sick of hearing nothing but christmas music on the radio think i've been there he's a real grumpy pants in the morning who absolutely needs his morning coffee hmm that sounds familiar and he relies on way too much cake to get him through his sad moments during the holidays how much emotional eating have i been doing my scale can verify that that one's true just saying they could not have made the grinch any more hashtag relatable the sympathy for the grinch has drilled home even more in the 2000 version of the movie with jim carrey where the grinch's entire backstory is that he was bullied as a kid for looking different you're eight years old and you have a beard and when the teacher sees what's going on she just laughs along with the bullies teacher of the year everyone this predictably leads him to lash out destroy christmas decorations and declare that he hates christmas and then he leaves town and heads out to the mountains to live in a self-imposed exile for the next several decades of his life i hate christmas i hate it and that was the last time we ever saw him look it's easy to look at the grinch and say huh he's not the most pleasant guy in whoville but i think by comparison he might actually be the most pleasant guy in whoville considering that nobody else in the town had any sort of compassion to think that maybe just maybe it might be worth forming a search party to go out and find the eight-year-old child who wandered off into the snowy mountains alone what a rant now of course these are all the modern portrayals the grinch was actually a lot meaner in the classic 1966 cartoon and the 1957 dr seuss book that it's based on and what we're told in this classic version is that no one quite knows the reason for why the grinch is so mean the grinch hated christmas the whole christmas season oh please don't ask why no one quite knows the reason and while the story then goes on to offer several working theories like the fact that his shoes were too tight or that his head wasn't screwed on just right or that his heart was too small the grinch himself actually gives us a pretty explanation girls and boys will wait all straightforward bright and early they'll rush for their toys and then all that noise oh the noise noise noise noise there's one thing i hate all the noise nice nice so today what i want to prove is that the grinch is kind of right that contrary to the story is placing the blame on him or some unknown reason we in actuality know why the grinch hates christmas and it is a valid undiagnosed medical condition that he has to deal with every christmas season now before we get any further i think it's important to go back to the original 1966 cartoon just to remember the extent of the who's noise making this isn't a case of someone's kid learning to play the recorder for the first time oh no the who's instruments of choice include things like the gar ginker and the who blur which create this awful din that sounds a lot like this of course between the flu floovers and the blum bloopers the one that takes the cake for the most obnoxious musical abomination is the great big electro who carnio schnook which seems designed to drive any person to the brink of sanity so when the grinch describes the noise as ear splitting i'm inclined to believe him also what's up with the conductor on the electro who carnio shnook just standing directly in front of the giant horn his hearing is probably shot by now maybe that's why he's standing there blissfully oblivious of how wretched the sound is speaking of sounds while the electro who carnio shnook might be a miserable sound to listen to you know what a good one is that sweet click of the subscribe button that ring of the notification bell give the gift that keeps on giving this holiday season and subscribe to film theory if for nothing else then to push us over the 10 million subscriber mark that would be the gift that keeps on giving to us at team theorist and also to you as you're notified every single week of the cool interesting thoughtful episodes that we have coming your way also let us know down in the comments below did you ever play an instrument growing up just curious anyway because these are mega sized instruments and there seem to be a lot of them floating around on christmas day in whoville we're gonna assume that they're roughly as loud as a marching band or about a hundred decibels of noise of course the sound that the grinch hates the most is the outdoor medleys composed of who voices and ringing church bells and then they'll do something i hate most of all stand close together with christmas bells ringing the ringing bells are actually worth taking note of because one of the main purposes of church bells in ye olden days was to inform people of the time across long distances in fact in the middle ages before the invention of pocket watches bells were the way that people kept track of time as for why it was church bells that were ringing well it's mostly explained by the fact that the church was the main reason you needed to be aware of the time farm laborers who back in the middle ages was about 90 of people could time the start and end of their days based on when the sun rose and set but in the catholic tradition there were certain religious devotions that were said at certain times of the day given that church bells were in many cases designed so people would be able to hear them even when they were miles away working in the field they were designed to be loud reaching volumes as high as 110 to 120 decibels that's around the same volume as a jet engine in fact in modern times most countries have actually passed laws outlawing church bells from being as loud as they were back in ye olden days it's also worth noting that decibel levels follow a logarithmic scale which means that a noise level being 10 decibels higher actually translates to it being 10 times more intense so an old school church bell ringing at a volume of 120 decibels is actually a hundred times the marching band volume that we just talked about and a hundred thousand times more intense than what is legally allowed in certain european countries nowadays so let's assume that we have ourselves 100 decibels of horns drums and honking combined with another 120 decibels of bells maybe the grinch isn't the one being so unreasonable here when he complains about the noise that the whos are making but to know for sure we actually have to calculate how far the grinch's lair is from whoville the grinch lives up in mount crumpet and because we're not really shown concretely how far the grinch is from whoville we have to do a bit of guesswork during the sledding scene at the end of the movie which lasts a surprisingly long time the grinch sleds downhill for a total time of 75 seconds to convert that time into distance all we need is an estimate for his speed and rather than relying on pixel measurements i think it's best that we go with some real world research researchers at the university of rochester medical center did a study that investigated the topic of average sled speed and found that the average sled travels at a velocity of 19 miles an hour or 47 kilometers an hour so taking that information we can find that the grinch's cave is in fact actually quite close to whoville he's a mere 0.4 miles or 0.64 kilometers away from the town square because sound decreases in intensity the further from the source that you are we can actually use this information to calculate how loud the bands and bells would actually be to the grinch in his cave if the church bells used by the hoos have an intensity of about 120 decibels then the grinch is going to be hearing them at a volume of 61.9 decibels that's somewhere between normal human speaking volume and the volume of traffic strange it's um it's not as loud as i was actually hoping for sure it's gonna be noticeable like he's certainly gonna be able to hear what's happening down in whoville but it really shouldn't be enough to make someone fly off the handle the way that we see the grinch reacting in the movie or at least it's not enough to make most people react that way and most is not all you see i believe based on all of this information that we just calculated as well as what's told to us in the story itself that the grinch suffers from a medical condition known as misophonia also called selective sound sensitivity syndrome this is an actual medical condition that causes certain sounds to trigger physiological responses manifesting as disgust or anxiety in mild cases or panic fear and extreme anger in more severe cases what's interesting is that misophonia has less to do with how loud certain sounds are and more to do with the kinds of sounds they are usually being triggered by specific sounds common mesophonic sounds include noises related to eating things like slurping soup or chewing loudly or repetitive noises like the squeaky sound of a car's windshield wiper blades it actually happens that my partner stephanie has misophonia and could provide a firsthand account of what it's like to actually experience this for her the sounds that trigger a physiological response are eating noises or other wet mouth sounds she's particularly sensitive to open mouth eaters because you can hear all the gnashing and wet smooshing sounds that the food is making across the teeth and tongue she's also sensitive to dogs and cats grooming because again wet tongue sounds and when it gets triggered i mean let me just say as an outside observer there is definitely an extreme emotional response but i'll let her describe it i've had the sensitivity since i was eight or ten years old starting with my parents eating sounds um they're both loud eaters and i noticed that i was really really bothered by the way that they ate pretty much all the time at first it's just an impulse to cover your ears like you're just hearing something really unpleasant you feel yourself just kind of wincing to get away from the sound i spent a lot of time asking to play music during dinner the tv anything to drown out the sound of eating if the sound doesn't go away you don't get used to it it actually gets worse and your feelings go from sort of being annoyed to at least for me feeling panicked and angry it all happens really quickly and even like pushing through with a lot of willpower trying to distract yourself nothing seems to make it better it's almost like you can't not hear it no matter what you do it's like very hard to describe how fast and how intensely angry i get when i actually can't get away from those sounds and i'm like a pretty even keeled person usually i think you've asked most of our team like i'm not someone who like flies off the handle i used to leave the table as fast as i could to get away from sounds when i was little um feeling like i was actually like on the verge of crying or on the verge of screaming even worse because it was so unbearable i know that sounds crazy the reason i didn't talk about it for literally decades was because i assumed it was just something i was imagining like maybe it was something that was wrong with me i also thought maybe i was just like an angry teenager who was angry with my parents or something but it wasn't just my parents it showed up with other people in other situations always the same sounds always eating always those like gross slurping teethy tongue sounds just at the absolute worst and i learned finally after i had gone all the way through school and all the way through college that it had a name and that it was misophonia and that i was not actually the only one to have this and it was a huge relief i felt like i had kept this thing a secret for like most of my life but to learn that other people had it was actually great misophonia isn't fully understood at this point the idea was first discovered in 2000 meaning that there still isn't a very large body of research into the causes but many researchers believe that our brains are naturally wired to filter out or ignore repetitive background noises but people with misophonia have brains that are just naturally wired in a way that doesn't let them ignore those sounds however based on what we do know about misophonia the grinch seems to have a textbook case of it if severe cases of misophonia trigger anger or distress well tell me if it seems like the grinch is suffering from a case of that all that is nice consider also that a lot of the noises that seem to bother the grinch are repetitive a paddleball toy with a repeated knocking sound repetitive beating of drums a constant ringing of bells all of it falling into the pattern of repetitive sounds that would trigger a mesophonic response this could also be further exacerbated by the fact that when we look down at whoville it appears to be situated in a caldera land formation a caldera is a hollow dip that's found near the tops of some mountains after volcanic eruptions leaving behind an empty bowl-like shape the reason it's relevant here is that the walls of the caldera could cause the noises in whoville to echo after all an echo is nothing more than a sound being reflected off a wall or some other surface so if you needed another reason to feel sorry for the grinch maybe add a hearing disorder to the list if we look at all the symptoms of misophonia like having a physiological overreaction to sound and being triggered specifically by repetitive sound everything seems to line up as for me the only sound this holiday season that seems to trigger a negative physiological response is the sound of silence that silence not being filled with the clicking of the subscribe button and the ringing of the notification bell screw those church bells those my friends are the best bells in all the land all right enough shelling but hey it's all just a theory a film theory and cut [Music] bye

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 7,395,313

Keywords: the grinch, grinch, how the grinch stole christmas, christmas, holiday, holidays, the grinch movie, the grinch trailer, grinch movie, grinch trailer, dr seuss, grinch full movie, the grinch full movie, how the grinch stole christmas full movie.nostalgia, holiday movies, christmas movies, grinch theory, jim carrey grinch, film theorists, film theory, matpat, film theory grinch, grinch film theory

Id: 0Fm2aX6jfAE

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020